What My Mother Gave Me by Elizabeth Benedict

Author:Elizabeth Benedict
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2013-03-11T13:00:00+00:00

Her Favorite Neutral

CHARLOTTE SILVER

I once watched my mother put out a fire with her bare hands. She was a chef and her hands, from decades of being in the kitchen, were tough. This happened in the old days when the restaurant she owned in Harvard Square used to have something called Cabaret Night, for which we hosted an old-fashioned supper club in the Club Bar with black-and-white diamond floors and the stuffed crocodiles that Teddy Roosevelt had shot mounted above the fireplace.

On one of those nights, a cabaret singer stood under those stuffed crocodiles belting out a Peggy Lee song called “I Love the Way You’re Breaking My Heart.” “Although you’re gonna ruin it, it’s heaven while you’re doin’ it,” she sang, and then, before anyone saw it coming, the sheet music brushed the tip of one of the candles and burst into flames. Back then, you still could use real candles in restaurants; you could smoke indoors, too.

We had not had a serious fire since I was little, when one of the kitchen pipes burst into flames. But because the restaurant, named Upstairs at the Pudding, was located in a drafty old Victorian building, the threat of fire loomed as a perpetual fear.

And so, the night the sheet music ignited, my mother didn’t waste a second. She jetted across the black-and-white diamonds to the piano and sliced her hands karate-style through the thickening flames. She did it; she put it out. The show, as they say, went on. The cabaret singer resumed her song, the bartenders rattled their cocktail shakers, customers returned to bowls of vichyssoise on beds of cracked ice.

That night, my mother was wearing a pair of black satin pumps with ribbons that laced ballerina-style up the ankles and, continuing this romantic sketch in a rather Degas mode, a full skirt with crackling layers of bluish violet tulle underneath.

Also, sunglasses: enormous Chanel frames sweeping movie star – style across her face, the lenses tinted a custom shade of lavender.

Also, a cocktail coat: this particular one comes back to me as a cloud of white chiffon.

These, these were my mother’s trademarks, her badges of feminine armor against the world.

IT HELPED, OF course, that she was beautiful. In her youth she was said to resemble Kim Novak and even worked, briefly, as a bikini model. And in dreary old Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the Puritan influence reigns in the genteelly faded color palette of the houses and the sensible shoes of the women, my mother is notorious for these sunglasses and for her style of feminine abbondanza at large. Pink is her favorite color, though not the wimpy pink of little girls but the lustier, more femme-fatale shades of adulthood. And leopard print her favorite pattern, the motif of a long series of gifts to me, some bought, some new, but many given straight from her closet.

In my mother’s universe and later on in mine, leopard was not so much a pattern as a piece of the background. “Leopard,” she used to say, “it’s my favorite neutral.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.